


Mothers and Sons

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Foxtrot [60]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1, The Dollhouse - Fandom
Genre: Gen, not actually RPF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-23
Updated: 2016-02-23
Packaged: 2018-05-27 10:22:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6280723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joe's forty-eight-hour emergency leave. For the <a class="i-ljuser-profile" href="http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/profile"><img class="i-ljuser-userhead"/></a><a class="i-ljuser-username" href="http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/">comment_fic</a> prompt: "Any, Any, The Sum of My Parts". Set post-series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mothers and Sons

The restaurant Joe took Amelia to was one she could never have imagined affording, but he smiled at the hostess at the door and asked for two tables. She took one look at his uniform – and a longer look at his face – and said she'd have something right away.

Joe's security detail involved one man who looked like an actual soldier, with short dark hair and blue eyes and very erect posture; a giant of a man with wild dreadlocks and a fierce grin; a woman with dark skin and eyes and hair who moved like a dancer; and another man with thinning hair and blue eyes and a square jaw who looked a little too soft around the middle to be a soldier but whose gaze was bright and alert. They all wore casual clothes and sort of blended into the crowd, although they would all look terribly out of place in the fancy restaurant.

The hostess gave them a private table near the back and seated the security detail at the adjacent table. Amelia could feel them watching her from time to time. The woman would smile when she made eye contact. The big man barely glanced at her, seemingly focused on his food. The soldier would smile at her, too. But the other man just looked...worried, anxious, his mouth pulled into a little crooked frown.

But Amelia was caught up in Joe soon enough. Every smile, every gesture, the way he laughed was so familiar. He looked more like her father than ever before, and for a moment she missed her own father fiercely, knew he would have loved to see the man Joe had become.

"We're alone now," she said, "and we have time for a long story, if you're ready to tell it." Her eyes filled with tears. He'd been through hell once, and only when he was eighteen, when he'd almost died at his father's hands to protect her, had she pulled him out of it and taken them far away. She could barely imagine what hell he'd been through since then. She'd read some of the news stories about Senator Daniel Perrin and his investigation into the Dollhouse with that Madeline woman, and the things Madeline had said...Amelia didn't want to imagine any of that happening to her baby boy.

The waitress was unobtrusive, refilling their drinks – just water for Joe, still in uniform – and bringing them bread and then bringing them their courses one by one, but Joe kept his voice low as he spoke. When he described the first time Topher put him down in the imprint chair, Amelia began to weep, and Joe rose up, went to kneel beside her and comfort her till the tears passed. Then he tugged his chair around so he was sitting closer to her, could hold her hand while he spoke.

And he told her – horrors. Nightmares. Being a tool and a weapon. Being a toy and a possession. Being suppressed, repressed, trapped. And then being a soldier – scared, wounded, tortured, rescuing, being rescued. At first his only friend was John Sheppard, and then he had the company of all the imprints, all the other people unwittingly born inside of him, who knew his skin as well as he did. And now he had other friends, Teyla and Ronon and Rodney and Evan, who by looking after John had been looking after him too, even though through it all he'd been so lonely and missed her so much.

She barely tasted the gourmet food, didn't notice the people shifting around her, servers coming in and out of the little world she shared with her son, diners leaving and arriving.

All she knew was that her son had gone through hell all over again, a worse hell than she'd let him suffer at his father's hands, but somehow he'd come out of it better. Stronger, braver, smarter. Kinder.

She was exhausted by the time the meal was done, so he ordered dessert to go, paid casually with John Sheppard's credit card, and kept holding her hand.

Together they walked back to the hotel, she clutching his hand for dear life as she listened, he carrying the boxes of dessert, his security detail – his friends – trailing behind them, making sure they were safe. They used one of Dr. McKay's credit cards to book rooms on either side of the one Amelia was renting at the motel and quietly arranged guard duty between them.

Amelia and Joe stayed up all night, talking. When it was her turn to tell her story, about all the years she'd missed him, all she'd done to find him, how she never gave up, not once, it was his turn to weep and clutch her hands.

They fell asleep hand-in-hand on her bed, her still in her clothes and shoes, him having shed only his jacket and shoes.

Major Lorne knocked on the door with coffee, pastries, and clean clothes for Joe.

And it was a new day. Amelia knew she only had her son for a limited time, that he still had battles to fight, but she was going to savor this respite they both had from the horrors of the outside world, because she had her own battles to fight too, some of them against a common enemy.

Amelia wondered how well Major Lorne knew Joe, because the clean clothes he'd brought were a pair of old, comfortable jeans, an anime t-shirt (she'd never understood his ability to enjoy bright, fast-moving cartoons with subtitles), and a pair of Converse sneakers, just like he'd worn the day he left for Stanford. Major Lorne promised to take care of John Sheppard's fancy uniform and whisked it away before Amelia could protest.

Joe's plan for their time together was – fun. Even when he'd been young, he'd never had much chance for fun, going to school or working on Grandpa's farm or hiding from the world alone in his room, escaping in numbers instead of friends and parties, so when he suggested doing something fun, she couldn't refuse.

They did touristy things, went to all of the famous monuments, posed for pictures together (Major Lorne was apparently the most competent with a camera). Joe was solemn at the Vietnam War Memorial, and Amelia wondered how much of the soldiering he'd really seen, really experienced. Between what she'd heard about the Wraith and Replicators and Goa'uld and Ori and other dangers in the galaxy, it was no surprise the world was terrified. But the way he reached out and traced over some of the names, she had the sense that he had seen friends die. Or had that been John?

For lunch, instead of another fancy restaurant, he took her to a fancy apartment (she later learned it belonged to General Jack O'Neill) and raided the cupboards and made her a delicious meal. One of his imprints, he said, was a good cook. The son she'd raised had been a decent enough cook, could fend for himself on the nights when she hadn't the energy or ability to cook, but never as good as what he made for her then, and she couldn't imagine that time in the military made a man a good cook, since the soldiers were notoriously fed awful commissary food.

The apartment had a piano in it, and after Major Lorne insisted he and the others would do the washing up, Joe sat down at the piano, closed his eyes, and played.

Amelia stood behind him, transfixed, a little horrified and a little amazed. The son she'd raised hadn't had a musical bone in his body, and his out-of-tune singing along to the radio had been a long-running joke between them. But to watch him play like he'd been born to it – playing one of her favorite songs, too – was surreal. When he was finished, he opened her eyes and smiled at her.

"I remembered," he said. "You always used to sing it to help me fall asleep when I was little."

She blinked to fight off tears. "I could never forget that."

"I don't think O'Neill has a guitar, but I can play the guitar, too."

Amelia wasn't sure she could handle the sight of that. Joe's father had played the guitar. It was one of the things that had first drawn her to him. He'd been playing at a party, and he'd been so handsome, and –

"But I don't want to stay cooped up in here all day. Want to go to one of the Smithsonian Museums?"

Amelia nodded. Even as a child, Joe's thirst for new knowledge had been nigh-insatiable. He'd probably read every book in the library twice over by the time he was fifteen. He'd always dreamed of going to the Smithsonian.

But going to the Smithsonian was a surreal experience, too. At the Air and Space museum, he spoke with casual confidence about the aeronautical engineering aspects about some of the aircraft and even about piloting some of them (John Sheppard was an Air Force Pilot, after all). At the art museum he spoke with surprising authority about periods and styles of architecture. Amelia nodded and listened, dazed. She'd always known her son was intelligent, but this was too uncanny.

On their way to the American History museum, they paused to buy some coffee. Amelia ordered hers black. Joe hadn't been much of a coffee drinker before he went to college, where he'd learned to drink it black like she did. Not anymore. When the coffee vendor turned to him, he rattled off an order that sounded half Italian and involved things that probably didn't even exist, but the vendor nodded like Joe's request was perfectly reasonable and set about making him a drink.

They paused at a bench so Amelia could rest her feet. Their security detail was carefully arranged on the benches to either side of them, looking for all the world like they were also out for Saturday strolls and not like they were playing guard to an old woman who didn't know her own son. Amelia watched Joe tilt his wrist gracefully, drink the strange coffee-latte thing.

He noticed her watching and paused. "Is everything all right, Mama?"

That was something she knew, the way he called her _Mama_.

"I just – you never used to drink your coffee like that."

He blinked at her, then down at his coffee cup. "Oh."

"And you never learned to play the piano or the guitar and you've certainly never flown an F-16."

A pained expression crossed his face, and then he set the coffee aside, leaned toward her. "Mama," he said, "I'm still me, still Joey. I'm just – more, too."

"But how can you...? After what the Dollhouse did to you –" She shook her head, and for the umpteenth time in less than twenty-four hours she was fighting off tears again.

He took her hand in his, and that sensation was familiar, but now he had calluses on his hands that weren't from working on Grandpa's farm.

"I know, Mama. What happened to me was – impossible. And scary. But some of it was wonderful, too. I came out of it, okay? I'm here. This is me. All of me. I'm more than just the sum of my parts."

"Are you stuck inside of – of _him_ forever?"

"I don't know, Mama. But what we have – it's me. It's us. It works. And I'm okay with that."

Amelia cupped his chin in her hand, searched his gaze. He was nothing but sincere. Just like he'd been sincere when he'd offered to forego Stanford and college and stay home and take care of her after high school if she wanted him to.

"Okay, baby boy," she said.

He smiled, and her heart melted. She'd missed that smile, and it was so good to see it again. If he could live with his situation, she could too, because it meant not only that he was alive but she had him back in her life, and after he'd been gone for so long, she couldn't bear for him to go away ever again.

She said, "Finish your coffee. And tell your friends they don't have to hang back. They can walk with us."

"They really can't, Mama." Joe picked up his coffee and took a long swallow. "If they want to stay alert, you can't be distracting them with embarrassing childhood stories about me."

"What about that Dr. McKay? He's not really a soldier."

"You'd be surprised what five years in the Pegasus Galaxy can do to even the least soldier-like of men." Joe stood up, offered her his hand. "This is our time. I promise, when it's safer, you'll get to know all of my friends."

"I'll hold you to that, Joseph D –"

"No, not where they can hear," he hissed, and she laughed.

Her first forty-eight hours with her son were the strangest and best of her life, and she couldn't wait till the next time she saw him again. After a golden light took him and his friends away for parts unknown, she resumed waging her battle on the Dollhouse.

And a few weeks later, she received a hand-knitted scarf, and with it a picture of Joe, wearing an Air Force uniform, sitting cross-legged on a chair and knitting. On the back of the picture was a note: _Pleased to meet you!_ It was signed with a heart and _Traci_.


End file.
